Replacing Master and Slave Terminology In My Book
This summer I planned to issue a special V2.1 update to my book, Show Networks and Control Systems. However, sadly, I am stuck in Amazon purgatory (details here) and I’m not currently able to change anything about the book, so I’m publishing the update here.
Update January 26, 2021: I have moved the book to a new printer, and the updated version is now available. Details here.
Here's what I wrote for the Preface:
Version 2.1
The racial justice protests of 2020 made me realize it was long past time to purge some offensive and obsolete language from the book. Specifically, the use of “master” and “slave” to describe control system architectures where one system has direct control over another. The roots of this book reach back to the 1990s, and I used this language because that’s what was widely used in the industry, and written in the technical standards that are the source materials for this book. But, in recent years, the technical community has become more enlightened, and so have I. So, this 2.1 update replaces that obsolete language, shifting to terms like “primary-secondary”.
Here’s the changed text, on Page 75 of the book:
Here’s a few links to various industry groups supporting this change and some comments from an engineer:
AVNU Alliance:
Thoughts from a black engineer at Twitter:
https://twitter.com/negroprogrammer/status/1278728952522043393
Extensive thoughts on the language from CDM: